Chris Hani

Martin Thembisile "Chris" Hani (28 June 1942-10 April 1993) was the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party from 1991 until his 1993 assassination, succeeding Joe Slovo and preceding Charles Nqakula. Hani was a famous South African communist leader, and he was a veteran of the guerrilla wars in both South Africa and Rhodesia, which saw the oppressed African majorities fight against the ruling white minorities. Hani was assassinated by the anti-communist Polish immigrant Janusz Walus in Dawn Park, South Africa on 10 April 1993 near the end of apartheid, and Hani did not live to see the racial integration of the country.

Biography
Martin Thembisile Hani was born on 28 June 1942 in Cofimvaba, South Africa to a Xhosa family, the fifth of six children. By 1954, he was too young to join the African National Congress, but he influenced other students to join the ANC before joining the Youth Wing in 1957. Hani protested against the Bantu Education Act, and he joined the ANC's Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) armed wing after graduating from the University of Fort Hare. In 1963, he fled to Lesotho after the South African Communist Party was banned, and he was trained in the Soviet Union before fighting in the Rhodesian Bush War. In the late 1960s, he took part in joint MK and Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army operations against the army of Northern Rhodesia. By 1982, he was prominent enough to be subjected to many assassination attempts, and he moved to Lusaka in Zambia. In 1990, he returned to South Africa after the ban on communism was lifted, but on 10 April 1993 anti-communist immigrant Janusz Walus shot him in the head and back as he left his car in the Dawn Park suburb of Boksburg. Riots followed the assassination, and both the apartheid regime and the ANC agreed for multiracial elections to be held in 1994 to speed up the solution to the conflict.